Leaving Google

I joined Google about 3 years ago and most of that time I worked as one of the tech leads of Google Wave. It was fun, exciting and slightly crazy. We went from being the most hyped product on the web to slightly ridiculed. Then we were cancelled...

After Wave I worked for a little while on the Maps API until my 20% project Shared Spaces took off and became my 100% project. It was fun for a little while but we've now transitioned it to another team.

Me and Douwe had been playing around with this idea for a start up for a little while and we felt it was probably as good a time as any to have a go at it. Together with Douwe's two brothers we're starting Triposo. We're building travel guides for mobile phones. We crawl open content on the web, merge, score and generally massage it in a pipeline (running on our rather beefy workstations under our desks at home currently) then publish it to iPad, iPhone and Android (Windows Phone 7 to come). Here is for example our Barcelona guide in the App Store and in the Market. They're not bad actually and we've barely started!

I'm also doing another start up. My son Samir was born last friday (he's a week old today!) so here's the mandatory new-parent gratuitous baby shot: